alon ko

Post a challenge, everyone responds with a photo or video. Spontaneous plans with friends, pull up on stories or tags.

[email protected]

[alon ko @joinaora]

this is how i feel as a new start up founder posting on x.

[Village Global @villageglobal]

Mark Pincus has been fired from every company he's worked at, including Zynga, where he fired himself.

Village Global Luminary LP @markpinc, Founder of @zynga and one of Facebook's earliest investors, sat down with @bencasnocha for a learning circle with founders and friends.

They discussed why founders' instincts tend to be right more often than their ideas, how Mark thinks about founder mode, where AI still falls short on taste, and more.

Watch the full conversation: https://t.co/mZK3MJaraj

[alon ko @joinaora]

@villageglobal @markpinc @zynga @bencasnocha the race towards the next internet treasure, can’t wait to see if it’s created by a consumer or some staff engineer in big tech.

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

We are living in the goddamn renaissance.

[alon ko @joinaora]

@joypbuilds meeeeeee

[Scott D. Clary @scottdclary]

Mark Pincus (@markpinc) built Zynga into a $12 billion exit. Before that he started six companies. Most of them didn't work.

The thing he told me that stuck: founders don't stay with bad ideas because they believe in them. They stay because they're afraid another pivot will break their team. They know in their gut this isn't it. And they keep going.

His filter for whether an idea is actually worth pursuing is simple. Build something narrow that's useful to you and a small group of people. If it works there, expand. If you have to convince yourself it's working, it's not.

#Entrepreneurship #Startups #MarkPincus

Full video: https://t.co/PKGIGne3NS

[alon ko @joinaora]

@markpinc human curiosity loops are so valuable, dau engineering through cliff hangars… has me thinking what the cliff hangars are in our own social circles and how to tie that into co-play.

[Rohan Nayak @RohanNayak2]

We grew from ~0 to $500M ARR, adding $250M last year alone while being EBITDA profitable.

1,300-word post on every growth tactic that worked for us:

1. What got us from 0-$400M ARR in the US works in every country.
2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks.
3. Localization > Translation.
4. Experiment with $1M internal seed checks.
5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth.

Pocket FM is like Netflix for audio-only dramas, with our own pool of one-person studios.

1. Acquisition Playbook for 0-$10M ARR in any country in 6 months

We run a 90 sec video trailer of an audio drama as an Ad and ask users to download the app if they're interested in the rest of the story.

Our core insight after spending >$100M on acquisition is: If the clickthrough rate (CTR) for an ad goes from 2% to 2.25%, our customer acquisition cost (CAC) decreases by ~ 30%.

We remodelled our system around this insight and built an AI-first 2.25% CTR ad manufacturing machine that works in every country.

For every new country, we take our hit shows -> use LLMs to extract and most intriguing moments -> Write a 5-min script combining all the best parts. The first 60 seconds has to have a hook every 5 seconds and needs to end with a crazy cliffhanger to force a download mid-scroll.

If a marketing video is not hitting our benchmarks (2.5% CTR and 55% 3-second through-play), a creative director gets involved to change the hook or cliffhanger to get the numbers there.

AI lets us make 1,000 Ads per show, and in total we do ~17.5k Ads per month. When a business creating scales from 1k to 10k Ads, the normal thing is for CAC to skyrocket. But with what I just shared, we 7-8x'd our User Acquisition budget without increasing our CAC materially.

It took us 8 months to figure this out, but then the timeline from 0-$10M in every country got shorter and shorter:

US revenue grew to $25M in 19 months. (US is now 78% of total)
Germany to 21M in 11 months.
France to $10M in 3 months.

2. Retention and Monetisation Hacks.

We knew we wanted to create an audio entertainment platform, but there was no standard format. For the first 2-3 years, we tried 10 different formats before landing on the winner.

After we got it right with audio drama (8-12min chapters, written for mobile fiction, serialized, episodes have strong hooks and end on cliffhangers), avg daily streaming time went from ~25mins to 150+.

Audio drama made us realize that Pocket FM was creating a whole new medium. There was no playbook for anything that we were doing. Everything had to be thought & built from scratch.
This is what we did for each major bullet:

- Monetization: Users have some free daily minutes to listen; then it's pay per episode. We also added the option for users to unlock episodes by watching ads, which is doing extremely well. Ads scaled from zero to a ~$90M run rate in 12 months.
- Engagement & production: You don't become obsessed with an app you open once a week. To have users engage daily, we make the next episode free every day. Also helps them build the habit.
- Discovery. Huge problem because people consuming Pocket FM enter the app, tap the show, and lock the screen. We fixed it by doing "playlists" of episodes. Once users's free minutes on a show are done, we ask users if they want to pay. If they say no, we play a new show, one where they haven't used their free mins. And we stitch episodes of different shows together that way, creating natural discovery.

3. Localization > translation.

78% of our revenue is still concentrated in the US. Localisation is fixing this: You might write a show for a Spanish audience where language, jokes, folklore, have a certain flavor; if you merely translate the show for, say, a Norwegian audience, that color is lost and hurts the show in the Norway. Listeners would relate more if the show was written by a Norwegian.

That's why, instead of translating, we localize shows to different regions. We use AI to take the spine of stories and adapt their whole cultural layer to the other country.

The results: a US show that was localized for a German audience had 50% higher retention than the translated version.

Localization + our user acquisition playbook led to:
- $10M+ ARR in France within 3 months
- $21M+ ARR in Germany within 11 months.

And this expands writers' addressable market.
We get messages of writers thrilled to have revenue coming from the US, India, EU, LatAm, without them doing much incremental work.

4. Experiment.

We give $1M checks to new internal initiatives, and the team has 12-18 months to prove their thesis. If they prove it, we double down.
This is how Pocket Saga came about, our AI video microdrama app. It's an AI video equivalent of Pocket FM. Same shows and structure, but as a vertical 2-min mobile video series.

We launched it two months ago and it's at ~$15M ARR.

Pocket's broader thesis is to help creators tell their stories to as many people as possible. Start with audio drama -> multiple languages or localize to diff countries -> microdrama -> more formats like movies, TV shows, and games.

Best of all is that writers get revenue streams not only from countries they wouldn't have tapped into, but also from formats they wouldn't have thought possible.

5. Pivoting to only AI content production unlocked 100% ARR growth.

In mid-2024, we pivoted to only AI content production.
Our growth took a very direct hit. Pocket was already at $200M ARR, growing 50% YoY, and we flatlined for a whole semester.

Six months later, the business exploded.

After the switch, we went from ~25k hours of content produced per year to over 2.5M hours, which are also higher quality. Because AI orchestrates the writing and more data is fed into it, more blockbusters come out.
Over 90 titles have $1M+ in lifetime earnings and 13 crossed $10M.

Quality control is done with LLM as a judge, and LLMs are quite tough.
Results are very encouraging:
- 12-month revenue retention went from 44% to 76%.
- In the past year, we added $250M in net new ARR.
__________________________________

Pocket Entertainment (Pocket FM + Pocket Saga) has become the largest AI entertainment platform.

We have the largest storytelling catalog with 770,000 titles, 550k creators, and 5.5B hours of playtime with minute by minute retention & engagement data. We are using all of this data to improve every aspect of our business.

Our Bet: In the next 3 years we will be able to produce Naruto-like series for $1000.

Netflix has to spend $17B to find 100 Blockbusters per year.
What happens when you can produce 1M high quality shows for $1B?

The streaming wars caused a $300B reallocation of market cap.
The AI entertainment wars may be a $1T+ reshuffling of market cap.

We are at a unique spot. Unlike other AI creator tools like Runway or Midjourney, we own both the supply and demand side of AI content.

We've attracted over 550,000 writers who are producing an annualized 2.5M hours of content every year. This pairs with 137B+ minutes streamed.

Because of this, growth is accelerating as we scale further.
We have multiple S-curves inflecting at the same time:

- AI produces better and more ads -> scale faster in new countries
- ⁠Writers + AI produce more shows -> more blockbusters
- ⁠Localisation -> more reach per blockbuster
- ⁠Audio to video format expansion -> larger TAM -> more creators

Every aspect of our business is designed to improve another, and everything is aligned so that the number of blockbusters continues to rise.

If you're interested in building at the intersection of ai, tech and entertainment, DM me.

[Brett Calhoun @brettcalhounn]

https://t.co/CsNyRiIK4V

[thijs @cdngdev]

i turned the entire actual city of san francisco into a video game!

with apple maps data, i made it so you can climb buildings, 'steal' cars, and explore anywhere. and you can play it!!

[alon ko @joinaora]

@cdngdev LOL

[alon ko @joinaora]

@JakeFleshner content challenges

[alon ko @joinaora]

@samweinstein @markpinc this is so good, fundamental focus on fun and intuition on play is lost on a lot of us.

[Sam Weinstein @samweinstein]

.@markpinc on Intuition and Taste: “You can't systematize or even train for intuition and taste.

We had a value put on the wall of "surprise and delight" because we want to over-deliver on quality for our users [which] isn't easy to measure.

There was a case study I did with Stanford on FarmVille when FarmVille 2 hit a point that all of its metrics started to sag, and the PM said, "The game is over." And they said, "We can't—there's no reason to keep investing in it. We should do a new game."

And every year with the MBAs at Stanford, I have them vote, what do you do in this moment? Do you do FarmVille 3? Do you just do a totally different game? Do you go to mobile? Or do you kind of double down on quality?

And it's amazing. The least votes are doubling down on quality.

And it's what we did. We just doubled down on quality. And we made one great feature that kind of over-delivered on surprise and delight.

And it just regained the trust of the users, and all of our metrics turned around and got better.

When I came back to Zynga as CEO in 2015, and all of our metrics were sagging and our app reviews and ratings were in the low 3.0s, I just sat down with the teams every week, every product meeting.

I literally started every meeting with, "What will our players thank us for?"

My friend @marcussegal made a neon sign, so it's the first thing you saw when you walked into work.

And that was the mantra of the turnaround because, amazingly, when we just read the reviews and started addressing their biggest complaints—bugs, popups—the metrics just turned around.

As the app reviews came back into the fours, the metrics, the engagement, the retention, revenues, everything just turned around.

And it's very difficult for someone who is just focused on metrics to make those decisions because they're irrational from a metrics point of view.

You can't—there's no cause and effect of, "I'm gonna fix these bugs. I'm gonna stop having so many popups, and somehow I'm gonna start to see all my metrics improve."

You know, it's the PM mindset, the traditional core: "I'm going to build this feature, it's going to drive this metric, I'm going to test this, it doesn't work."

And it's like a new muscle, and it's just, again, non-intuitive from a metrics point of view.

But it's my lived experience, and I don't know how to systematize that. I don't know how to train for that.

And so much of this product-making journey is about our gut, and it's about getting good at using yourself as the focus group of one and watching how you do this experience and what you're drawn to, and keeping the virgin state of that.

Never making yourself use your app or another app, but saying, "Oh, wow. I'm finding myself addicted to this thing. I'm drawn to this. What's in that?"

And I talk a lot about adrenaline. I like it when there's something in this experience that gives me some adrenaline.

That's hard to get to.

Life is kind of boring and routine and lacking in adrenaline. And that's why some people are adrenaline junkies, and they, in their free time, go skydiving and do crazy stuff because in their day-to-day life it's lacking that.

But then when you see something edgy in one of these experiences that you're not expecting, that can be what Bing and I called an "OMFG moment."

Like, "I can't believe someone just did this in my weather app."

And the more boring and rote and routine it is, the more opportunity there is.

I say we're trying to find a vein. We've gotten so bored and we just know now they're going to show me another popup. Now they're going to try to get me to hit a paywall.

And when you break that chain in some way and do something that you're not supposed to do, that non sequitur hits a different part of people's brain.

I wrote all of the text links for Zynga games, promoting game ads in the beginning, because I had fun just playing with, "Well, what happens if I misspell this? What happens if I just use whatever they're seeing on social media? Or what happens if I make it really clear there's a human doing this?"

Bad grammar or whatever would come to me. I just, in a flow of consciousness, tried it.

And that's what would work the best because it's like, "Oh, there's—it's not corporate. You're not trying to manipulate me. There's someone on the other side that I can picture."

I can picture Jing. I can picture Mark.

Even billboards on 101. I find if it doesn't make sense—even because they did something stupid—it hits my brain in a different place.

It's like a puzzle I can't solve.

"Wait, I don't even get that ad."

But if I don't get it, it gets more of my attention than if I do get it.”

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Literally

What you Imagine

Can be made real

[sourcery @sourceryy]

Mark Pincus (@markpinc) says @nikitabier is one of the best at uncovering great ideas buried in failed apps:

"You can learn so much from a failed product that has a great idea buried in it."

"The founder of TBH had that experience. He said there was an Arabic language product that was doing this honesty box."

"He was a perfect example of Proven Better New because he actually found a proven concept."

"It was buried in a very, very narrow, niche product. He said, 'Great, I'm just going to take that idea, copy it, and make it front and center.'"

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to pass the torch and demote myself to my natural state: a poster. I'll be stepping back from leading product for 𝕏 and will continue on as an advisor.

Serving the X community has been the privilege of a lifetime. X is, and will remain, the most important communication technology in history. But running this app is a 24/7 job and it's now time for me to take a breather.

The app is seeing unprecedented growth in new users & engagement. We continue to break records every month. We've climbed 70 spots in the App Store since this time last year.

And in the last 400 days, we rebuilt almost every aspect of X: the Timeline, the Android app, onboarding, notifications, chat and more.

We also launched nearly 30 new products while protecting the integrity of the town square: becoming the first app to show Country-of-Origin on profiles and mounting defenses against AI bots. There's certainly much more work to be done, but our foundation is stronger than ever.

None of this would have been possible without the incredible team here. The next leaders will take X to even greater heights with @benjitaylor on design, @singhai on core product engineering and @dinkin_flickaa on mobile engineering -- among many other great people.

Thank you to Elon and the X team for welcoming me into the company. See you on the Timeline.

[alon ko @joinaora]

@joypbuilds she ran out of fable credits

[Paul Mit @pmitu]

Please hear my advice:

- YC won't accept you (low chance)
- Your startup (probably) won't go viral
- VCs won't chase you
- TechCrunch won't write about you
- No one is going to save you (sorry)

Build your product as if NONE of those will happen.

That will be more helpful.

[mark pincus @markpinc]

This is so true.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The point of a startup is to make usable technology for others. When you make software, you have to watch at least 10 people use it. Sit next to them and say absolutely nothing. Force yourself to marinate in the failure of your product design.

Every version 1 of any software will be absolutely destroyed by first interaction with users. You need to watch your new creation be absolutely misunderstood by users to reform version 1 into the one that actually works.

There is only one path: figuring out where the sharp edges, the places people get caught, the assumptions you make as a builder that turn out to be wrong, and then relentlessly sanding it down so that anyone can use it.

That is good design. That is the key to a good product. There is no shortcut for this.

WATCH USERS AND CRINGE AND THEN FIX IT.

SAND DOWN THE EDGES.